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Bass Clarinet, Contra Bass, and Contra Alto Music

Albert R. Rice

in From the Clarinet D'Amour to the Contra Bass: A History of the Large Size Clarinets, 1740-1860

Chapter five is dedicated to bass clarinet music grouped in the categories: early reported works; notation practice; a chronological description of works from 1834 to 1860 listed by composer; band ... More

Chapter five is dedicated to bass clarinet music grouped in the categories: early reported works; notation practice; a chronological description of works from 1834 to 1860 listed by composer; band music; and music written for the contra bass and contra alto clarinets.Less

The Poetics of Sensation in L’Africaine and Tristan und Isolde

Gabriela Cruz

in Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera

Chapter 5 investigates Meyerbeer’s and Wagner’s treatments of operatic perception and sensation in L’Africaine, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde. The discussion highlights the preoccupation with ... More

Chapter 5 investigates Meyerbeer’s and Wagner’s treatments of operatic perception and sensation in L’Africaine, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde. The discussion highlights the preoccupation with pleasure and innervation that the two composers shared during the late 1850s and 60s. The music dramaturgies of Wagner and Meyerbeer centered on exotic tress and poisonous blossoms are discussed in parallel, not to show, as others have done, what Wagner learned from Meyerbeer and improved upon, but rather to draw attention to the works’ shared preoccupation with enhanced perception and the role of dreamlike experience in the theater. This shared preoccupation is considered in light of Charles Baudelaire’s poetics of modernity.Less

“Every Word Made Flesh”: Les Huguenots and the Incarnation of the Invisible

Mary Ann Smart

in Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera

In both Robert le diable (1831) and Les Huguenots (1836), Giacomo Meyerbeer had treated religious subjects in a resolutely mundane and material vein. Certainly, Les Huguenots was a shining example of ... More

In both Robert le diable (1831) and Les Huguenots (1836), Giacomo Meyerbeer had treated religious subjects in a resolutely mundane and material vein. Certainly, Les Huguenots was a shining example of the opera's commitment to a kind of visual materialism. It focuses on the religious strife between Catholics and Protestants leading up to the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572. It is tempting to argue that the opera is not about religion at all but rather about voyeurism, its dramaturgy propelled by a poetics of surreptitious looking and listening. This chapter explores the apparent contradiction between the libretto's intermittent endorsements of absence and invisibility and the insistent “fleshiness” of Meyerbeer's music. A quest for “embodiment” or the “word made flesh” in Meyerbeer's music might begin with instances of the melodrama-style orchestral music seen in La Muette de Portici. In the context of the chapter's inquiry into music and gesture as a whole, Meyerbeer's portrait of the character Marcel is a crucial case, making explicit the links between “miming music” and the charisma of physical presence.Less

The School of Abbé Vogler: Weber and Meyerbeer

Dana Gooley

in Fantasies of Improvisation: Free Playing in Nineteenth-Century Music

Chapter 1 tracks a line of improvisational influence that issued from the organ playing and theoretical teachings of Georg Joseph (Abbé) Vogler, whose most famous students were Carl Maria von Weber ... More

Chapter 1 tracks a line of improvisational influence that issued from the organ playing and theoretical teachings of Georg Joseph (Abbé) Vogler, whose most famous students were Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer. Although Vogler was in many respects a product of eighteenth-century aesthetic and theoretical dispositions, he also had a progressive, even experimental streak that manifested itself in his improvisations. He anticipated the figure of the modern virtuoso by touring and playing organ concerts that featured dramatic improvisations depicting biblical narratives. Most important, he made keyboard improvisation an integral part of his pedagogical method, requiring students to improvise simultaneously with him and with each other. While Vogler instructed his students in thoroughbass methods, his improvisational teaching featured freer types of contrapuntal and figural elaboration that influenced their performances and compositions. Vogler’s approach to improvisation encouraged harmonic experimentation that influenced Weber’s and Meyerbeer’s expanded use of tonality.Less

The Age of Grand Opéra

Vincent Giroud

in French Opera: A Short History

This chapter examines the history of French opera during the age of Grand Opéra. It explains that the period from 1825 to 1870 era was a golden age for opera in general and French opera in ... More

This chapter examines the history of French opera during the age of Grand Opéra. It explains that the period from 1825 to 1870 era was a golden age for opera in general and French opera in particular, and that phrase “grand opéra” had already been applied to tragédie lyrique even before this period. The chapter also describes the works of some of the major opera composers to emerge during this age of French opera, including Ferdinand Hérold, Daniel-François-Esprit Auber, and Giacomo Meyerbeer.Less

Les heureux étrangers—Italian Music Drama

Mark Everist

in Music Drama at the Paris Odéon, 1824–1828

This chapter examines works by Gioachino Rossini, Giacomo Meyerbeer, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and considers the ways in which Italian music drama was adapted to the conventional boundaries of ... More

This chapter examines works by Gioachino Rossini, Giacomo Meyerbeer, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and considers the ways in which Italian music drama was adapted to the conventional boundaries of French music drama with spoken dialogue. Rossini, Mozart, and Meyerbeer had a significant place in the musical and theatrical culture of imperial Paris. Of the thirteen Italian works mounted there more or less intact, eight were by Rossini, two by Mozart, and one each by Meyerbeer. In Restoration Paris, Italian music drama meant Rossini, and so it was at the Odéon. Mozart's music dramas had been adopted more than a decade after the composer's death. Meyerbeer attempted to show Pixérécourt the translation of Marguerite d'Anjou but could not have been in a position to show Pixérécourt all the lyric items. The spoken dialogue was therefore probably mostly complete at the end of September 1825.Less

The Diorama, Apparitions, and Dream Image in Robert le diable

Gabriela Cruz

in Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera

The far-reaching transformation of grand opera into a modern medium of spectacle was inaugurated by Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable. In the Act III ballet, with the theater darkened, the dead ... More

The far-reaching transformation of grand opera into a modern medium of spectacle was inaugurated by Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable. In the Act III ballet, with the theater darkened, the dead left their graves, and, phantom-like, haunted the stage. Those “ghosts” of deceased nuns clad in white ushered in a new genre, the ballet blanc, while another phantom—Robert’s mother—bestowed on grand opera the gift of lyric spectrality when Alice, in Act V, relayed the woman’s last words. Parisian mélomanes regarded this moment of song with special reverence after the 1830s and, arguably, its lyrical qualities guided efforts to reform singing in the 1830s and 40s. But, at the same time, Robert ushered in a new understanding in Paris of opera as an art of dream-like states: indeed, it was the visual procedures of phantasmagoria and diorama that inspired the radical change in Meyerbeer’s art of composition.Less

Introduction

Albert R. Rice

in From the Clarinet D'Amour to the Contra Bass: A History of the Large Size Clarinets, 1740-1860

For the subjects investigated, this introduction describes: origins, instruments, makers, music, and performers of a subset of the clarinet family, called here large size clarinets. Along with an ... More

For the subjects investigated, this introduction describes: origins, instruments, makers, music, and performers of a subset of the clarinet family, called here large size clarinets. Along with an investigation of the history and construction of each instrument, the author studies the makers; classification, terminology, music, and notation utilized. A timeline reveals when each instrument was developed and used. Important relationships between and among composers, performers, and instrument makers are illuminated. These include Franz Süssmayr with Anton Stadler; Beethoven with Johann Stadler; Felix Mendelssohn with Heinrich Bärmann and Carl Bärmann; Saverio Mercadante with Catterini Catterino; Giacomo Meyerbeer with Franco Dacosta; Sigismund von Neukomm with Thomas Willman; and Michael Balfe with John Maycock. Sources of inspiration are enumerated.Less

Melismatic Madness and Technology

Sean M. Parr

in Vocal Virtuosity: The Origins of the Coloratura Soprano in Nineteenth-Century Opera

By the mid nineteenth-century, coloratura had become stylized to the point that it could represent hysterical cries. If we consider technology in its original sense as a “practical art” that extends ... More

By the mid nineteenth-century, coloratura had become stylized to the point that it could represent hysterical cries. If we consider technology in its original sense as a “practical art” that extends the body’s abilities, then coloratura—an art that features the extended agility and range of the voice—is perhaps the most striking technology employed to mark and empower the operatic madwoman. This chapter explores mid-century mad scenes and related technologies: Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’Étoile du nord and Le Pardon de Ploërmel, as well as Ophélie’s mad scene in Ambroise Thomas’ Hamlet. These operas also feature sopranos who embody a particular, aestheticized view of femininity at mid-century as stylized, objectified icons of hysteria. Exploring the aural impact of these scenes, the sopranos who originally portrayed the mad heroines, the original staging manuals, and the historical context of emerging psychiatry highlights the importance of the visual in thinking about this phenomenon.Less

Wagner and German Jewish Composers in the Nineteenth Century

Michael Haas

in Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis

This chapter examines the works of Richard Wagner and the conditions of German-Jewish composers in the nineteenth century. It analyzes Wagner's 1850 polemic Judaism in Music and the works of Felix ... More

This chapter examines the works of Richard Wagner and the conditions of German-Jewish composers in the nineteenth century. It analyzes Wagner's 1850 polemic Judaism in Music and the works of Felix Mendelssohn, which showed a reverence for tradition that would become a feature of German- and Austrian-Jewish musical assimilation. The chapter also discusses Wagner's political and cultural legacy and the works of composers born during the early years of post-revolutionary Enlightenment, including Giacomo Meyerbeer and Ignaz Moscheles.Less

The Phantom Ship in Der fliegende Holländer and L’Africaine

Gabriela Cruz

in Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera

This chapter describes two instances of the re-mediation of grand opera by phantasmagoria, discussing side by side two deployments of the figure of the phantom ship—a seafaring image produced by ... More

This chapter describes two instances of the re-mediation of grand opera by phantasmagoria, discussing side by side two deployments of the figure of the phantom ship—a seafaring image produced by phantasmagoria at the Adelphi Theatre in of Edward Fitzball’s nautical drama The Flying Dutchman (1826)—in Richard Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer (1843) and Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine (1865). Wagner’s music for the apparitional scenes, discussed in detail in the chapter, suggests a manner of composition adapted from the technical procedure of phantasmagoria and the nautical theatrics cultivated by Fitzball in London. L’Africaine’s nautical scene was also partially inspired by the English figure of the Flying Dutchman, exploring the same idea of magnification that was central to phantasmagorical procedure and to Wagner’s approach to the nautical.Less

Uneasy Bodies: Verdi and Sublimation

Mary Ann Smart

in Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera

This chapter begins with Giacomo Meyerbeer's Robert le diable (1831) because a single aria from that opera exerted a powerful magnetism for Giuseppe Verdi. It looks at the conjunction between melodic ... More

This chapter begins with Giacomo Meyerbeer's Robert le diable (1831) because a single aria from that opera exerted a powerful magnetism for Giuseppe Verdi. It looks at the conjunction between melodic climax and kneeling gesture in Verdi's career. One context for Verdi's kneeling scenes can be found in Enrico delle Sedie's 1885 treatise on operatic acting, the Estetica del canto e dell'arte melodrammatica. Given the kneeling gesture's roots in the lexicon of mélodrame, it is hardly surprising that a very similar pose appears in Verdi's own grand opera—although the scene for a kneeling soprano in Don Carlos (1867) is far less static and less semiotically transparent than the stock situations of mélodrame. Verdi's near-erasure of pulse and emphasis on consummation in the afterlife in both the Don Carlos and Aida (1871) duets leave behind early nineteenth-century aesthetics of sensibility, to move both toward a more “transcendent” musical style and toward a dramatic mode in which the body (and especially the female body) is more symbolic than concrete.Less

Conclusion: Afterlives of the Romantic Machine

in The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon

The French Revolution of 1848 was triggered in part by injustices and miseries associated with the emerging industrial regime. Yet reformers such as Victor Considerant, Louis Blanc, Flora Tristan, ... More

The French Revolution of 1848 was triggered in part by injustices and miseries associated with the emerging industrial regime. Yet reformers such as Victor Considerant, Louis Blanc, Flora Tristan, Claire Démar, Jeanne Deroin, Etienne Cabet, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Karl Marx did not call for an end to machines, or a return to a pure and unmodified nature. Instead, they argued for continued inventiveness in the administration of machines, a rethinking of their use and ownership, and careful forethought about their consequences for society and its milieu. In advocating mechanical romanticism, these reformers proposed a vision of the human as a creature dependent on its ecological milieu, with the power to change its surroundings by means of technology. This chapter examines the impact of the 1848 Revolution and the Second Republic's paradoxical presentations of labor and machinery, including the Festival of Industry of 1849, Giacomo Meyerbeer's opera The Prophet, and the pendulum experiment of Léon Foucault.Less

The Devil's Opera: Fantastic Physiospiritualism

in The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon

During the late nineteenth century in France, the epistemologist Gaston Bachelard introduced the notion of phénoménotechniques to describe the distinctive mode of knowledge that came of age in the ... More

During the late nineteenth century in France, the epistemologist Gaston Bachelard introduced the notion of phénoménotechniques to describe the distinctive mode of knowledge that came of age in the study of chemical forces and invisible fluids. He argued that the work of physicists and chemists involved the design of apparatus to produce novel, artificial phenomena which could subsequently be brought into theoretical relation. However, a darker, stranger note came to dominate the romantic arts from the middle of the 1820s and heralded the rise of what is known as fantastic literature. One of the most famous of the Parisian fantastic arts was Etienne-Gaspard Robertson's Fantasmagoria. This chapter focuses on the phantasmagoric technologies for visual and auditory illusions: Panoramas, dioramas, the “fantastic” symphonies of Hector Berlioz, and Giacomo Meyerbeer's hallucinatory opera Robert le diable. It also looks at phénoménotechniques in the sciences that were often the basis for technaesthetics in the arts, along with theories of “physiospiritualism” and Honoré de Balzac's reading of Robert le diable as a reflection of technology's power to produce the transcendent.Less

Religious Wandering in French Romantic Culture

Thomas Kselman

in Conscience and Conversion: Religious Liberty in Post-Revolutionary France

This chapter presents the “wandering Jew” as a symbol that captures the significance of religious choice in French culture during the Romantic era (1800-1848). It relates the surge of interest in the ... More

This chapter presents the “wandering Jew” as a symbol that captures the significance of religious choice in French culture during the Romantic era (1800-1848). It relates the surge of interest in the story of the “wandering Jew” to other major works of the period which focus on religious conversions. Novelists Chateaubriand and Eugène Sue, operatic composers Halévy and Meyerbeer, the essayist and poet Heinrich Heine, all created works in which religious conversion is at the center of tragic scenes that show individuals in conflict with themselves, their families, and their communities. These stories establish the cultural context within which the converts studied in this book lived and thought.Less

• Das Judenthum in der Musik

Clive Brown

in A Portrait of Mendelssohn

In his 1850 essay Das Judenthum in der Musik, Richard Wagner openly criticized Jews in general and Felix Mendelssohn in particular. In his introduction, Wagner focused on the transformation of the ... More

In his 1850 essay Das Judenthum in der Musik, Richard Wagner openly criticized Jews in general and Felix Mendelssohn in particular. In his introduction, Wagner focused on the transformation of the political and social position of the Jews in the first half of the nineteenth century. He then discussed the Jew's characteristics in a manner that showed a repulsive degree of racial loathing and how the Jew expresses himself before arguing that the Jew was constitutionally incapable of true musical creativity. Wagner went on to condemn the music of the synagogue and linked the inevitable artistic impotence of the Jew to Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer, two of the most successful musicians of his time.Less

Vestiges of Virtuosity: The French Coloratura Soprano

Sean M. Parr

in Vocal Virtuosity: The Origins of the Coloratura Soprano in Nineteenth-Century Opera

The specificity of late coloratura’s function in arias has its roots in operatic writing before mid-century. Examining the role pairings in Meyerbeer’s popular nineteenth-century repertory opera, Les ... More

The specificity of late coloratura’s function in arias has its roots in operatic writing before mid-century. Examining the role pairings in Meyerbeer’s popular nineteenth-century repertory opera, Les Huguenots, serves as a starting point for understanding the transition from coloratura as a normative singing style to one that functions as an uncommon and conspicuous gesture in operas like Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Delibes’ Lakmé, and Massenet’s Manon. The soprano roles in these operas hark back to the zenith of coloratura singing at mid-century, when high notes and melismas were an aural analogue to the ornamental decadence of Second Empire Paris. Coloratura arias in these operas are the late-century exceptions that prove the rule; they are echoes of the virtuosic vocality of the mid-century examples explored in the book. And they help codify the establishment of the modern French coloratura soprano.Less

Mother Love

Elizabeth Harlan

in George Sand

This chapter discusses the meeting of George Sand and the then young Polish composer Frederic Chopin. With the looming threat of the Russian occupation, Chopin fled Poland and arrived in Paris in ... More

This chapter discusses the meeting of George Sand and the then young Polish composer Frederic Chopin. With the looming threat of the Russian occupation, Chopin fled Poland and arrived in Paris in 1831, the same year Aurore Dudevant went to the capital to launch her literary career. Among the other distinguished guests at the soiree were Giacomo Meyerbeer, Eugene Sue, Heinrich Heine, and a group of Polish exiles associated with Adam Mickiewicz, who would shortly become a professor at the College de France. Although Sand was immediately taken with Chopin, the relationship got off to a slow start. “I've made the acquaintance of a great celebrity, Madame Dudevant, known by the name George Sand,” Chopin wrote his parents several days after their meeting. “But her face doesn't appeal to me at all. There's even something about her that puts me off.”Less